I read the petition in the waiting room of Dr. Patel with Renee beside me and the magazine of the lady across from us held very still, and I read it from the bottom up, the way my husband taught me to read anything that came with a lawyer. the signature of Dale was there, dark and firm. Above it was a list of charges against me that did not describe any woman I had met. Confused. Unable to manage her affairs. A danger to herself. And in the blank for the judge, a number typed in advance. Thirty.
“What does the thirty mean?” I asked Renee quietly. She told me it was the number of days. The lawyer in Baton Rouge had told Dale that the hearing could be set thirty days after the filing, and that I would be served at home, with a notice and a court visitor. Renee said that Dale did not plan to tell me at all until the papers arrived. He called it “getting ahead of things.” He had practiced the speech at the kitchen table with the folder open. She had listened from the hall.
I kept my face still, as I once did on the lunch line when a child told a clever lie. I asked Renee why she had come. She said that for thirty one years she had sat at my table on Sundays and eaten my gumbo and been treated like a daughter. She said she could not watch her husband do this, and she could not say it to his face. “Because I know why he is doing it,” she whispered. “Dale owes a great deal of money. More than he has told you. More than he has told me.”
She told it plainly. For two years he had been going to the riverboat casinos in Bossier City on weekends, on the pretext of a fishing club. The losses had mounted. He had borrowed against the house and then against his truck. He had come to believe that the house of his mother, free and clear, and her savings of sixty four thousand dollars, were the only way out. “He thinks he is saving us,” Renee said. “He thinks you will never know.” She wiped her eyes. “I could not let him take your life to fix his own.”
A mind is not measured by what a person forgets but by what she sees clearly, and the true danger lies in those who cannot see themselves.
I patted her hand and rose from the chair. Dr. Patel was standing at the door of his office, with his glasses in his hand, and I could see that he had overheard enough. He said quietly that he would write a statement for the court, if it were ever needed, with the full results of my examination. Thirty out of thirty, he said again, and the corners of his mouth twitched. Then he said that he would be honored if I would allow him to introduce me to a lawyer who specialized in the affairs of older people.
Her name was Ms. Thibodeaux, and she had an office over a bakery on Texas Street that smelled of cinnamon. She heard the whole story with her hands folded, then said that the petition had not been filed, so it could not yet be defended. But she would write to the lawyer in Baton Rouge that very afternoon to inform him that I was represented, that I had been medically evaluated, and that any filing without evidence of incapacity would be met with a motion for fees. Her letter went out at four. By Friday, the other firm had withdrawn.
Dale came on Sunday, alone, to my kitchen door. He stood on the step with his hat crushed in his hands and his shoulders bent like a man in a storm. I let him in. He sat at the table where I had fed him as a boy, and I put a bowl of gumbo in front of him, because I did not know what else to do. He did not touch the spoon. He told me everything, without a lawyer, in a voice so low that I leaned forward to hear it. When he finished, the pot was still bubbling.
I said the first thing that came to me. “Dale, you are not a thief. You are a frightened man who thought you were alone.” He cried, and I let him, and when he was done, I told him what would happen. He would call the number for a gambling recovery group that Ms. Thibodeaux had given me. He would meet with a credit counselor with Renee beside him. He would not sell the truck, and I would not pay his debts. But I would sit with him at the table of the counselor. That was the offer. It was the only one.
He took it. I made a new will that week, and a medical directive, in the presence of Ms. Thibodeaux. I named Renee and Dale together as agents for my health decisions, should the day ever come when I could not make them, and I gave them no authority over my money. Each page I read aloud and signed myself. The lawyer put it in a folder and laughed. “I have seen many women in this office,” she said, “and not one has read her own papers back to me like a schoolteacher.”
Dale is fourteen months into recovery now. He goes on Tuesday evenings to a church basement in Cedar Grove, and Renee goes with him on the first Tuesday of each month. They have paid off the smaller debts and are working on the large one, with a plan that fits on a single page. On Sundays, they come to my house and he sets the table without being asked. Last month, he took my arm on the steps of church, and I let him lead me in.
I frame things now. The score from Dr. Patel hangs on the refrigerator, signed and dated, next to a drawing by my youngest grandchild. And in the pot of Lucien, every Sunday morning, I make a roux so dark it is nearly black, the same way as ever, with no recipe. It simmers all through the sermon. When the family comes through the door at noon, the whole house smells of it, and nobody has to be told what it means.